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Sun and Canonical Expand Ubuntu Support to Galaxy Boxes
Published: November 14, 2006
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Server maker Sun Microsystems and Canonical, the commercial presence behind the Ubuntu variant of Linux, have announced that the two organizations have certified Ubuntu on Sun's "Galaxy" line of Opteron-based Sun Fire Servers.
In May, Sun and Canonical announced that Ubuntu was being ported to run on the "Niagara" Sparc T1 processors, which have a multicore architecture that is distinct from the single-core and dual-core UltraSparc brethren of the Niagara chips. Because Sun has released all of the specifications for the T1 chip through the OpenSparc project, Canonical was able to get a fairly fast port done of its Ubuntu Long Term Support 6.06 release to the T1000 and T2000 servers made by Sun that use the T1 chip.
Getting Ubuntu ported to the Sun Fire Galaxy machines was certainly a lot easier, since they are based on Opteron processors. So far, Ubuntu LTS 6.06 has been certified on the X4100 and X4200 servers and the Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 workstations. It is reasonable to expect that the two will work to get Ubuntu certified on the entire Galaxy line, which includes smaller X2100 and X2200 platforms as well as the larger X4600 16-core server.
Sun was also trumpeting the fact that its "GlassFish" Java EE 5 application server will be distributed with Ubuntu LTS 6.06, and is the first such Java application server to be bundled with this variant of Debian. Ubuntu was launched in October 2004 and has millions of licenses distributed around the world.
What Sun is not doing, somewhat paradoxically, is offering customers the option of preloading Ubuntu LTS 6.06 on its Niagara and Galaxy servers.
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